as she could and opened the door.  She had hid my clothes, but missed one of my shoes, and her mother saw it.  “Oh, A.,” was all she said; “you’ve got that fellow in bed,” and went out crying.  “Well, Fred” (my stage name), “you’ve got me into a nice row,” A. said.  She gave me my breakfast in the morning and I walked out of the front door without being molested.  Another night I entered her window by a ladder and stayed all night.  In the middle of the night E. came home drunk.  She would not let him in and told him she would have nothing more to do with him.  He attempted to break in the door, when A. called to me, and hearing a man in the room he went away, saying, as he went downstairs:  “Oh, A.!  Oh, A.!” as if he thought she would not have done such a thing.  He never molested us after that night.

I think it was my intention, at first, to break off with A. gradually.  I found, however, I could not keep away from her, and it commenced to be evident to me that a bachelor’s life in lodgings again would be dreary and lonely.  And all this time the fear that I had offended God troubled me more than I have said, and it occurred to me (there may have been a touch of sophistry in this, or not) that if I were a true husband to her for the future—­stuck to her and worked for her for the rest of my days—­perhaps it would find favor in God’s sight and be an atonement for my sin.  Had she been free I would have married her, I believe.  But she began to be harassed by her mother and bothered about my incessantly coming there and staying all night.  It ended in my telling her I would be a husband to her, and she came and lived with me at my lodgings.  We had one room and our meals cost us sixpence each.  Cheap as it was, it was a struggle for me to earn money at all.  I remember feeling ill and anxious once, and sustaining myself by the thought of my father wheeling the heavy truck up the street when he married my mother.  And I decided to wheel my truck, too.

A. seemed happy and her love increased, if possible; at first, though, she must have found me a trying lover, for I made her kneel and pray with me two or three times a day, which she did with such a queer expression of face.  Sometimes her feelings got the better of her, and she would say:  “Oh, damn it, Fred, you are always praying.”  And then I would be shocked and she would be sorry....  Coitus was frequent; she commenced to like it now....

A. was not looking well one evening when she came in, and lay down on the bed.  Presently she commenced to make a strange noise, and I saw her eyes were closed and her hands clenched.  “Ah,” said the landlady, who came in to help me; “she has epileptic fits.”  When her convulsions were over she looked blankly at us, knitting her brows and evidently puzzling her poor brain to remember who we were.  For many years it was my fate to see her looking at me thus, at first stony and estranged, like a dweller